The activities of many architects may be readily situated in a specific context. In such cases, both the meaning of their work and the modalities of its development are best understood in terms of their personal biographies and their geographical and cultural backgrounds. This does not hold true, however, in the case of Jose Cruz, whose work is best seen from the standpoint of a certain movement – a movement between places, between activities and between diverse dimensions of architecture. His oeuvre is tensioned by polarities whose presence generates the system of coordinates by which we may properly comprehend his work.

BETWEEN BARCELONA AND VALPARAISO

Cruz once confided to me that “in Barcelona, I learned to calculate the length of a beam.” Thus does he customarily exaggerate in reducing the essence of what he had learned there to a certain technical mastery. We may safely assume that he learned considerably more than that during his 17 years in the Catalonian city and his time at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), then in the midst of one of its best periods. Cruz began his formal training in architecture at the Catholic University in Santiago following a year of engineering at the University of Chile, but shortly thereafter left for Barcelona where he completed his undergraduate studies and began work on a doctorate. While there he also taught at the School of Architecture with the philosopher Eugenio Trias, as well as at the Col-legi de Filosofia. During the same period he wrote for the journal Jano Arquitectura and started up a professional practice in an old house in Calle Nueva Santa Eulalia, in the upper part of Barcelona’s Sarria district.

Cruz evidently never lost sight of what was happening in Chile while he was away. I remember a chance encounter with him in the courtyard of the Catholic University’s Lo Contador campus one warm summer afternoon. It must have been in January of 1978, and he had come to look up Raul Irarrazaval’s work on Chile’s Central Valley, which he still remembered and for some reason thought worthy of renewed interest.

If I remember rightly, it was in a project for the Spanish post office in the early eighties that I first noticed Cruz’s efforts to bring into play a sort of approach based on certain notions taken from the Valparaiso School. His family connections with Alberto Cruz Covarrubias and his belief, acquired at a distance, in the value and originality of the research being done in Valparaiso led Jose Cruz to construct, bit by bit, his own version of those ideas. The process gathered force with his return to Chile and the more mature work he began producing here.

This tension between a vision born of the technical competence and knowledge of architectural debates and contemporary ideas gained through his Barcelona experience, and the impact on him of the Valparaiso School with its emphasis on research and the particularities of the New World, run deep in the work and thought of Cruz. It manifests itself as a fecund double distance that has allowed him to face the challenges of architecture with originality and create a language of his own that, though not claiming to be a new departure, has become more and more recognizable. Cruz’s ability to both resist that tension and channel it as a driving force behind his architectural production is fundamental to an understanding of the nature and results of his work.

BETWEEN FOUNDATION AND CRAFT

Cruz has developed his oeuvre in the day-to-day world of professional commissions, remaining true to his own dynamic. Yet this has not prevented any of his creations from generating its own discourse that serves as the work’s explicit foundation. This is a fundamental requirement for Cruz and is expressed in his many projects, resulting in a series of manuscripts and drawings that reflect the observations, points of departure and internal structures governing his works. These manuscripts have often accompanied the publication of his productions as testimony to the thinking that gave rise to them. It is on the basis of these ideas that Cruz insists in explaining his works, for it is precisely those terms that define the works’ context and allow them to be properly understood and judged (1).

It might be thought that such an exercise is the mark of a theoretical architect. And in a sense this is true, for there is always a certain theoretical dimension, or at least a theoretical position, in Cruz’s work. But such a view of his output would be incomplete, for Cruz’s theoretical starting point is always counterbalanced by a clear and mature knowledge of his craft expressed in a consummate conception of structure and a mastery of construction, among other ways. His works often display a complex technical dimension that is deliberately concealed, as though he preferred it not to be felt. This mastery of his craft not only lends an essential solidity to his oeuvre but also imparts to it an additional intensity. His output can hold its own both in its general concept and its details (2).

Thus, the works of Cruz reflect the tension between the abstractions of theoretical ideas and the concrete as manifested in material thinking. Such a tension is not commonly found in Latin American architects, and is no doubt one of Cruz’s most fundamental contributions to the panorama of contemporary Chilean architecture.

BETWEEN SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE

In those years when we were both in Barcelona, I remember Cruz devoting a number of long weekends to sculpting in his workshop in Samalus on the outskirts of the city. Quite apart from the envy I felt at his ability to combine this intimate, almost clandestine artistic activity with his professional work, I could sense how it revealed a significant aspect of his vocation. One only had to see a few of these creations to be convinced that they constituted something considerably more than just a weekend pastime. The exhibitions he has since held in Chile have revealed this personal facet giving to his artistic activity its own stature (3).

Sculpture for Cruz is a way of reflecting on form and material. It is a reflection that, unlike a commissioned work of architecture, is initiated at the creator’s own insistence and follows the rhythm of an independent dynamic, executed directly by his own hands. This is very different from the conditions in which architectural production takes place, yet is complementary to it. The relationship between sculpture and architecture in Cruz is somewhat reminiscent of that between painting and architecture in Le Corbusier, who saw the canvas as a laboratory for his architectural activity (4). The relationship is a sort of abstract field in which one may explore various themes related to form and space, themes which often give rise to architectural arguments. A significant part of Cruz’s efforts to infuse his architecture with an investigative dimension is evident in his sculptural activities.

This very brief description of the tensions and distances between significant places, architectural dimensions and activities is the key to understanding the position of Jose Cruz as a place where situations originally far apart have been able to meet, connect and dialog. Through this conjunction of voyages, tensions and distances we may correctly situate Cruz’s many contributions to the architecture produced in Chile in the 1990s. It also serves to explain the inaugural nature of a work like the Chile Pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville, which helped trigger a new vision of Chilean architecture in the international panorama. This conjunction also allows us to understand the technical and architectural solidity of a series of his works, often in wood, that in addition to their intrinsic quality have effectively modified the material sensibility of Chilean architecture. And finally, it enables us to comprehend the unusual maturity of a recent work like Adolfo Ibañez University, completed on a tight deadline, whose architectural form configures the complexities of university life while expressing a thoughtful relationship with the Andes mountains and the Central Valley landscape.

Jose Cruz’s architectural activity may thus be seen simultaneously as a series of paths that join distant points in contemporary architectural culture and thought and a particularly fruitful crossroads between them.

August 2004